India can link a final and unequivocal legitimisation of China’s sovereignty over Tibet to a settlement of border dispute. Even more specifically, India could use the Tibet ‘card’ to the Tawang tract in Arunachal Pradesh.

K Subrahmanyam has been one of the eminent expositors to state it bluntly: non-alignment was always the practice of realpolitik cloaked in idealism. That the ideological veil got confused as an end in itself, manifesting in moral outbursts, was as much a reflection of India’s relative material weakness in the international system as it was of strategic naiveté.